Wanted: a political officer class

JAY FRANKLIN

An invitation to young men to enter the service of a government which is badly in need of them

The country enters the New Deal much as it entered the World War: with magnificent material for the rank-and-file and a horrible shortage in the officer class. In this respect, we are worse off than we were in 1917, for then at least General Leonard Wood had been operating the Plattsburg camp for a couple of years, while there is as yet no political Plattsburg for the American Government.

For a generation, the political life of the country has been run by pretty much the same group of men. There have been a few impressive changes at the top of the heap, and one or two changes half way down—as when young Mr. Chase Mellen ousted old Mr. Sam Koenig from control of the Republican Party in New York City—but, on the whole, the National, State and County Committee work is handled by the same old boys who were beginning to contract economic gout and hardening of the political arteries back in the brave old days of Teddy and Woodrow Wilson.

This means that our political machinery has been dying from the roots up. In 1929, when Herbert Hoover entered the White House, he had to go back to the Taft Administration for his Cabinet material; and in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt fell heir to the resultant mess, the best he could do in many instances was to hit the high spots of the second Wilson Administration in picking men for the big job ahead of him. It is easy to criticize men for selecting benevolent octogenarians in filling public office, but where are the young men to put in their place? They just aren't there! For thirty years, our great Universities have been pouring out stock-brokers, bond-salesmen, corporation lawyers, bank-runners, and manufacturers in super-abundance, but not public servants. In 1929 the records showed that out of the graduating class of 1919 in a large Eastern university, only one man was engaged in any form of government service. The university happened to be Yale and I happened to be that man. There had been one other class-mate, who had gone into State politics in Minnesota for a while, before retiring into private business. For the rest, they were all doctors, lawyers, merchants, and sp forth.

The same was true of virtually every other large American university. Business claimed our best and brightest. The Government limped along on political hacks and second-raters. It worked all right for a while until the bills came due, and we are still paying them, for the public business is the most important business in the country and its neglect is the most expensive form of national economy. Onetenth of the drive and perspective lavished on business operations in the neo-Harding era, if it had been directed toward politics; could have saved the country billions. Imagine, for example, if thirty years ago, Owen D. Young and men like him had taken the political instead of the business route. Suppose that his remarkable talents for conciliation and wise administration had not been specialized in channels of business profit but had been directed towards remodeling our national institutions. He would have been a greater though poorer man, and we would be a greater and richer country.

PARALLEL CAREERS: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.— Unfortunately, we have no satisfactory way of recruiting young men of ability into the political rank-and-file. For generations, the British aristocracy have maintained their power—and have, incidentally, given the United Kingdom an infinitely more radical type of Government than anything America has ever experienced, by the comparatively simple device of sending their brightest men into politics and keeping them in public life. Here's how they work it:

Young Montague St. John (pr. "Sinjin") Burnaby-Wallis is a member of Christ Church College, Oxford, as well as being related on his mother's side to the Earl of Porthwick, His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Disestablishment of the Church. At Oxford, Burnaby-Wallis is a rather brainy chap, distinguishes himself at the Union by upholding the affirmative of "Resolved, that the Royal Family Should Be Deposed," contributes to the Isis, and wins the Mardigate Prize by a metrical translation of the Odes of Pindar in the manner of W. S. Gilbert. After BurnabyWallis receives his degree, the Earl of Porthwick offers him the post of Private Secretary. As such, Burnaby-Wallis has the run of the House of Commons Terrace, is put up for White's (or perhaps Brook's), and becomes familiar with the operation of British politics. After three or four years of this, Sir Frederick Marsden, Chief Whip of the Party, allows young Barnaby-Wallis to stand for the constituency of Buff-Orpington, and he either is returned as Member of Parliament or, as is more than likely, is soundly defeated by Mr. Albert Griggs, Labor Party candidate, in which case Sir Frederick allows him to stand for a "safe seat" in Yorkshire at the next byelection. Once in Parliament, BurnabyWallis stays there and, as his ability is demonstrated, he may in time become Parliamentary Undersecretary for the Demolition of Insanitary Housing, rising at length to the eminence of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, a K.C.B., or, perhaps, a Vice-regal appointment to the post of Governor-General of New Zealand.

Let's see what happens to Mr. Matthew Faneuil Otis, graduate of Harvard, who also has political aspirations. Mr. Otis has to select his permanent residence somewhere, before he is eligible for any elective office at all. Say he selects the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. Does he find the local politicians waiting with open arms? No, he finds them waiting with open hands. If he can't sweeten the kitty, he's not wanted. Then, if undaunted, he can begin by being a ward-heeler, working with a probably corrupt and certainly myopic group of rumble-belly vote-grabbers. If, after years of effort, he has mustered enough support to win a post on the Board of Aldermen, or even the Mayoralty, he is both lucky and exceptional. Then, by slow degrees and always working with the machine, he may rise to the State Legislature or the State Senate, and, by the time he is fifty, aspire to a seat in the House of Representatives. And all the time, he is expected to give money, time and energy to a full-time political business which involves everything from getting a suspended sentence on a convicted bootlegger to easing through a new franchise for the streetcar company. Not until late in life does he ever come in actual political contact with the great national issues of—say—unemployment, tariffs, war and peace, or social reform, and by that time it is too late.

The only short-cut on the American political ladder was the short-cut of an executive appointment. Mr. Otis can, at any time he desires and can pull the right wires, get himself appointed to a lowsalaried technical job by the Governor or the National Administration, where he is virtually forbidden to use any of his accumulated political experience and where he must continue to take orders from a group of mildew-minded valetudinarians who are still busily arguing as to how many constitutional amendments can dance on the point of a needle.

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Either the stultification of machine politics or the stratification of an administrative bureaucracy awaits the young hopeful. Neither is very appetizing, but of the two the second is his best bet.

To be appointed to-day, however, the young American does not need to promise the German voters the Polish Corridor or the Irish voters the breakup of the British Empire; neither does he have to promise high tariffs to the manufacturer and high wages to the working man. All he has to do is to get a Senator to endorse him—and Senators love endorsing people: it costs them nothing and strengthens their political position—and one or two administrative officials to request his appointment. A little shoe-leather, a good deal of flattery, and a lot of patience, and lo! there is Mr. Matthew Faneuil Otis, Third Assistant Deputy Administrator of the Banana Oil Code Authority.

Once in office, he is on the map and can begin to work for a living, though not a loving, wage for the Government. Therefore, the best advice that can be given to the Class of '34 is to go political, and prepare for a career in government service.

THE LARGEST EMPLOYER.—The Government today is the greatest employer of labor in the country. It is working on scores of ambitious proj'ects. It requires the services of hundreds of thousands of ambitious men. It won't pay those men highly but it will pay them something, which is more than can he said for many other lines of business activity. Ventures like the N.R.A., the A.A.A., the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, are starving for the services of young men of promise, who are not afraid of hard knocks and who are willing to prepare for them. Hitherto, the Government hasn't known where to find the right men to officer this huge movement.

Wall Street obviously cannot easily supply economists who are prepared to make hash of many cherished Fatted Financial Calves. The business system does not easily produce men who are geared to the philosophy of lower individual profits and higher public service on the part of industry. The college faculties can supply any number of competent academicians and detached philosophers, but too often their policies read like Ph.D. theses and their ideas smell faintly of the midnight oil rather than reflect the midday sun. The legal profession has been overspecialized in defense of the established order and the material advantage of individual clients, which makes it difficult for the average attorney to engineer wide breaches in the established order or to advocate the public interest. The technicians are too much hypnotized by their dynamos and their pistons to visualize the human side of policy—they think of politics as being a system which will permit the construction and operation of huger dynamos and bigger and better pistons. Even the farmers, the traditional source of many-sided political leaders, are too busy licking their own sores to worry about the empty stomachs of the city Streeters, while the labor leaders, almost to a man, are wedded to the innocent belief that higher wages and shorter hours for members of such unions as are affiliated with the A. F. of L. provide the perfect solution of all our problems.

Go political! Take your cultural course, study a little economics, read Karl Marx and Adam Smith and then throw them both out of the window! Hitch-hike your way across the Continent, get a job for a few weeks as a harvest hand in Kansas or work your way across the ocean as a deck-hand on a steamer. Study chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, Old English or Sanskrit, anything but politics. Don't study politics, practice it! Manage a class-election, stage a crusade for the abolition of the fraternity system, get into a local political campaign—on either side or on both!

Then, whether you flunk your final exams or pass with a summa cum laude, pull all the wires you can lay your hands on and get your Senator or your Representative to recommend you to the Administration for a job.

Your first job is to know what is happening to the people of the country which you are helping to administer, so don't fail to read the newspapers every day, and if you must skip anything, skip the so-called political news. Don't watch the stock-market; watch the price of food and bankruptcy and foreclosure proceedings! Don't analyze Senators; analyze suicides and crimes! Don't study the Constitution; study the "Letters to the Editor" and the human-interest stories.

Thus only can you make yourself a part of the new order in American Government: an administrative politician. You must be partly a Civil Servant and partly a political psychologist. The old Party machinery is dying. Let it die! Bigger men than you have broken their hearts and ruined their reputations in trying to reform it. In the future, the flexible, semi-political bureaucracy can be to the ambitious young American what the Grande Armée was under Napoleon and what the British Parliamentary system was under Rosebery and Beaconsfield: a carrière ouverte aux talens. It is today the only part of our Government where youth can be promptly served. Soviet Russia has its Communist Party, Italy its Fascisti, Germany its Nazis. For the young men of the United States of today and tomorrow there is the appointive governmental service under the New Deal.

American business can't give you the breaks of yesteryear. Take a look at the employment records of the graduating classes of 1930, '31, '32 and '33. The Government offers the only shortcut to power and responsibility, now that the old roundabout methods of Party politics have been solidified on the basis of seniority. Eventually, of course, political methods will be simplified or displaced by new Party machinery, but the young men of this generation can't afford to wait until 1940 to begin their careers. Let them get a Government job and work their heads off, and their future will be in their own hands.